The restaurant offers happy hour specials during the week, and will be open until 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays during racing season.

Chef and owner Rory Moran opened the restaurant one year ago in the Downstreet Marketplace, 454 Broadway. Moran invites all to visit www.comforteats.com and follow @comforteats on Twitter.

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How did you get into the culinary field?

I've worked in restaurants since I was 15. I started as a dishwasher, moved up through the ranks, learned at home on my own, and then learned from great chefs I worked with. I'm born and raised in Saratoga. Before I opened the restaurant I was at Max London's for about three years.

What's unique about this restaurant or its menu?

Number one: the fact that we get the majority of our produce from the (local) farmers market every Wednesday and Saturday. All of our chicken and turkey comes from a farm in Vermont. Besides that, everything else we do is made in-house, with the exception of our bread, which we get from Mrs. London's or Rock Hill Bakery. If there's anything that we aren't preparing ourselves, we're getting it from a local artisan, someone who does really well in that field.

Also, our menu items are something that aren't really available anywhere else in town for lunch. We're kind of a combination of quick-service takeout, delivery and people dining in. So we have a huge range of age groups and demographics. People tend to all love comfort food, so that's really the basis of the menu.

How did you decide to open Comfort Kitchen?

For about two years before we opened I was planning the menu and all of the extensive things that go along with opening a business. We just celebrated our one year anniversary on June 12. It's nice to look back after a year and see how much we've grown. There's a vast difference from opening day to today.

Why did you choose to serve comfort food?

Comfort food is sort of always the food I went back to, even after cooking in fancy restaurants. It's always the food that everybody loves. It's comforting. There's something for everybody on the menu. And it's American, which is nice.

We have a lot of flexibility. Our menu changes with the seasons. It's nice to have that variation. And I think our guests really appreciate that we always have new specials.

What's the most popular dish ordered?

Our burger, our mac and cheese, and our house made tater tots.

One of our best items is our burger, and it's a custom burger (meat) ground fresh at The Meat House in Wilton.

I always say pick your favorite comfort food. We try to get everyone to try the tots for the first time, because everybody thinks that tater tots are something that comes in a bag and you stick in the oven. It's a completely different thing. We make them all by hand - it's very labor intensive, but everybody tries them and loves them.

What's your favorite thing to cook at the restaurant?

It really depends on the season. But I guess I love making pasta. We do a lot of that during the fall.

Do you have any special summer menu items coming soon?

During track season we are going to have lobster rolls every weekend, which was very popular last year.

When we have tomatoes in season, they're going to be on everything. We make our own mozzarella in the restaurant and we do a tomato mozzarella salad with that, which is going to be really popular. We always like to do different specials with what we find at the market and what's seasonal.